


Letters Home

by devilinthedetails



Category: PIERCE Tamora - Works, Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Courtly Love, Declarations Of Love, F/M, Falling In Love, Family, Gen, Letters From War, Letters Home, Love, Love Letters, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-31
Updated: 2018-08-31
Packaged: 2019-07-04 19:36:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15847977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devilinthedetails/pseuds/devilinthedetails
Summary: Lord Wyldon and Owen write letters home to Cavall.





	Letters Home

**Author's Note:**

> I picture Owen writing this letter to Margarry before he deserts in Lady Knight but you're free to imagine it differently.

Letters Home

With Father gone to war, Margarry prided herself on having the sharpest eyes in Cavall, hawk eyes that she had inherited from him. It was she who spotted even from the window of the high tower of the solar where she was helping her mother manage household accounts the distant figure of a courier riding the wooded path up to the castle and alerted her mother to his impending arrival. 

She would have dashed down the winding stone staircase to the entrance hall if Mother hadn’t been beside her, prepared as ever to offer a disapproving arched eyebrow if Margarry dared to trespass against the intractable rules of propriety. Instead she gathered her skirts neatly in her hands and matched her mother’s brisk but dignified stride downstairs. 

The messenger was mud-splattered and Margarry suspected Mother would have scolded him soundly for besmirching the marble floors of her castle if it hadn’t been weeks since a letter had arrived from Father or Owen, her father’s squire with whom she was corresponding regularly ever since he had asked her in an awkward yet somehow not unflattering fashion if she would mind if he wrote to her while he was away at war. 

It had been the first time any young man had expressed interest in her with her hair prone to flying half out of her plait whenever she was excited about something that shouldn’t have been fascinating to a gently reared lady. She had never cared that no young men paid court to her since she had always been more in love with horses and dogs than boys. Yet Owen had made her cheeks flame and her fingers tremble with his clumsy question about writing to her… 

( “Your father and I will be riding off to war soon.” Owen’s gray eyes were eager as they looked at her near the fireplace in the parlor where they were both pretending to be reading so they could whisper without her parents’ interference. “I don’t have anyone to send a letter to so would you mind if I sent one back here to you?” 

“Is that what I am to you?” Margarry had glared at him over the spine of her book even though she was touched by the idea of being the only person he wanted to write to from the front. “Someone to write to because you don’t have a better alternative?” 

“No.” Owen’s eyes clouded with the realization that he had put his foot in his mouth again, and Margarry had to stifle a giggle at how easy he was to horrify out of his wits. She lived for the surprise that flared in his gaze when she took him aback with a pointed comment. “That’s not what I meant at all. There’s no better alternative than you. There could never be a better alternative than you. That’s why I want to write to you if you don’t mind.” 

“Well.” Margarry pretended to consider denying him just to have the pleasure of watching him flounder on tenterhooks before her. This must have been the before elusive thrill that other girls found in flirting, she decided. “If you truly are that desperate, you may indeed write to me, Squire Owen.” 

“You honor me.” He should have kissed her fingers when he said that, but the fact that he didn’t proved that for all his courage and chivalry he wasn’t concerned with manners and thus was more perfect for her than if he had been the type to obsess over the minutia of etiquette.) 

He had been as diligent about writing to her as her father had been to her mother so the fact that she had received no notes from him made her worry, furrowing her forehead when she petted the dogs in the kennels and biting her lip when she slipped sweets to the horses in the stables. The stables and the kennels that had been her refuge since childhood were no sanctuary from the fear that her father or Owen were dead or dying on some lonesome battlefield. 

Whenever she stroked a horse’s mane, she thought about how Father had taught her how to brush it and how she and Owen had laughed as they tugged out burrs from tangles of horse hair. Then she would pray to Mithros that they weren’t cold and bled out from a cruel, swift stroke of a Scanran sword. Whenever she cradled a puppy in her lap, she would remember how Father had shared breeding tips with her and how she and Owen had run the dogs ragged playing fetch. Then she would hope—because in the absence of letters all she had left were her hopes, her prayers, and her memories—that their sightless eyes weren’t staring into infinity like those of fishes tossed ashore by tumultuous waves. 

“A letter from your husband, my lady.” The courier’s bow before Mother as he extended an envelope to her jarred Margarry out of her recollections of her father and Owen.

“Do you have anything for me?” Margarry demanded of the messenger in a breathless rush as her mother opened Father’s note. Often the courier carried her a letter from Owen at the same time he brought one from her father to her mother. This time, however, the courier shook his head, so Margarry contented herself by reverting her prodding to her mother.

“Mother,” she pressed once she felt she had given her mother suitable time to read her father’s latest correspondence, “what does Father write?” 

“Nothing about the war but no news is good news.” Mother’s smile was determined as her tight tone. “He writes mainly of Cavall.” 

It had looked as if Father, who valued brevity in writing as much as he did in speech, had penned an uncharacteristically lengthy epistle to her mother until Mother discovered that the second piece of parchment was addressed to Margarry. Proffering the parchment to Margarry, Mother said in a carefully neutral voice that could have concealed approval or disapproval, “This is for you from Squire Owen.” 

Margarry expected Owen’s effusive, upbeat descriptions of the soldiers he had befriended that in their carefree quality almost allowed her to forget that he was charging into battles alongside her father whether they both could be forever taken from her. Instead his letter was somber and short—saying only what was needed in small sentences that somehow conveyed everything she had ever dreamed of hearing from him without even noticing that she had harbored such hopes. 

For the first time, he was wild in admitting his love for her. Before he had been open about every emotion except his feelings for her but in this note he inked the forbidden words neither of them had dared to acknowledge earlier. 

I love you, he wrote, and that simple phrase was enough to make her whole and unravel her at the same time. Her heart hammered against her eardrums, her pudding knees wobbled, and she sank onto the staircase. The note bearing these words that had altered her life irrevocably had arrived in care of her father, which meant that, on some level, he endorsed them or at least didn’t loathe them enough to burn the letter before it had enflamed Margarry. Her world was shattered and remade by Owen’s declaration of love only to be destroyed again when he went on: When it gets rough up here, I close my eyes and I see your pretty smile. Please don’t worry but I won’t be able to write for awhile. 

“He says not to worry but he won’t be able to write for awhile.” Margarry hated how choked—as if every hope inside her had been stifled— she sounded. She must seem so weak and she didn’t want to imagine how splotched her nose had to be. Imagining her appalling appearance along with the preposterousness of Owen believing that she wouldn’t worry after he had stated that it was getting rough at the front when she was a Cavall, intensity and anxiety bred into her bones, made her emit a shrill laugh that reminded her of the gossiping girls she had hated at the convent. “He doesn’t know me at all if he thinks I won’t worry about him.” 

“Perhaps he knows you will worry but doesn’t want you to do so.” Something in Mother’s knowing grin made Margarry believe she had read Owen’s declaration of love. “Perhaps he loves you.” 

“I can’t bear to think about that when he’s at war.” Margarry buried her face in her palms, his affection for her even more unthinkable because she knew in her heart and her soul that she loved Owen too and wouldn’t regain her happiness until he returned home to her.


End file.
